AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND

Crony capitalism is how capitalism fails. It may be the likely end-state for capitalism, but we don't have enough experience with capitalism to know for certain.

The very fact that we call out crony capitalism means that we can see a world where capitalism can work better.

Think about sports. Cheating, betting on games by the players, the bribing of referees, steroid doping, using financial might to make the competition unfair: all those may be the end state of professional sports. It's something we always have to fight against, and it's a fight that's never won. That doesn't mean that sports should not exist because eventually they will be corrupted. It just means that those are things that we have to stay vigilant against. It's really the viewers / fans who have to keep the pressure on to keep things honest. If fans get fed up and refuse to watch, the sport collapses and dies. This has happened many times to professional sports leagues.

Adam Smith is widely seen as one of the main thinkers behind capitalism. He wrote The Wealth of Nations as a theoretical foundation for the system. In it, he is constantly warning about ways in which it can be corrupted if people aren't vigilant:

People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible, indeed, to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary.

...

The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market, and to narrow the competition, is always the interest of the dealers. To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can only serve to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens.

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As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce.

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Commerce and manufactures, in short, can seldom flourish in any state, in which there is not a certain degree of confidence in the justice of government.

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We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbors and equals.

And on, and on, and on. Basically the foundational text on capitalism says "capitalism can be better than feudalism / manorialism, but those rich fuckers are always going to try to screw the people, so we need to keep them in line."

I'd love to live in the Star Trek world, where you only have a job if you want a job, because all your needs are met by replicators, computers and other technology. Maybe we can get there eventually, but we're not there yet. Capitalism sucks, but it sucks less than feudalism / manorialism. It also seems to be a system that is actually stable and can exist in the real world. Communism has always collapsed back to authoritarianism whenever it has been tried. It would be great if communism worked in practice, but it doesn't, so we need a realistic alternative until someone invents the replicator. Luckily, while communism always collapses, systems with a mix of socialism and capitalism seem very stable. No country is fully capitalist or fully socialist today, but some of the places where people report being the happiest have a healthy mix of socialism and capitalism. So, while we're searching for a better system, we're stuck with capitalism mixed with some socialism. And it can be better, if we heed the warnings of one of its foundational thinkers and continue fighting to keep the rich fuckers in line.